It’s another warm evening: there was torrential rain while Lydia was in the station, but it’s passed on and the streets are almost dry already. She’s been in there about eleven hours. In some ways that’s a long time, but when she considers how much has changed since she entered the building, it’s hardly any time at all.
The street around the corner from the police station is lively, its bars and stagewalks doing good business—summer-season tourists often sleep most of the day and come out at night when the heat’s more bearable, especially those from the north country who aren’t used to it. She calls a diplomatic car (to her relief, she hasn’t been struck off the access list), and rides it up towards the Upper West Side. She checks her notes, and among all the ones from her connections she finds a fretful one from Mum and a more measured, but still concerned, one from Gil. She dashes off replies to assure them she’s fine and hasn’t been arrested and to ignore all news that doesn’t come from an official police source, and onto Gil’s message she tags a stream of her progress through the streets of Manhattan because she knows he’ll enjoy it. She taps the dashboard, idly flicking a finger against the catch that releases the emergency steering wheel, tempted to pull it and just drive the car right out of town. They’d pick her up at the tunnel of course, but it’s fun to think about. She wonders what these diplomatic cars are like to drive. She imagines driving with Gil through these big old wide streets, taking the right-angled corners at speed. They could have such a laugh.
She’s struck by how few other people she feels the need to reply to. Her friends from home mean little to her now, she never made any good friends at the language school, she hasn’t made a single hardspace friend since she got to New York and her INS means she really depends on her hardspace friends in a way typicals just don’t understand. Maybe that’s why she got overly invested in her relationship with Fitz.
When Lydia reaches the street where the residence is and gets out of the car, it feels like the noise of the city has been placed under glass. She can sense the shock, people still trying to take it in. Or maybe she’s projecting that onto the scene. Maybe people are just getting on with their lives. Maybe they’re excited by it. Maybe Mrs. Kloves is delighted some danger has returned to Manhattan at last, and even now is thrilling at the possibility of someone else being murdered in their own home tonight.
A uniformed NYPD officer is stationed outside the residence, with a drone. They told her someone would be there in case Hari turned up, but of course it’s also to keep an eye on her. Alinn pointed out part of the reason they’ve allowed her to come back to the residence is that if she’s hidden the murder weapon in the building, they hope she’ll try to dispose of it and lead them right to it in the process.
But what if they’ve planted a weapon in there and are waiting for her to find it, put her prints and DNA all over it? What if that’s why she’s been allowed back?
She resolves not to poke into too many corners.
The drone idees her and the cop waves her inside.
The residence is quiet. This is no different to how it usually is—Fitz never made much noise—but the silence means something now, which it didn’t before. The study door is shut, as it would have been if he was alive, and Lydia doesn’t want to open it. She doesn’t want to see the room without him in it, and she certainly doesn’t want to see the bloodstain on the carpet, assuming they haven’t taken the carpet away as evidence.
It’s a relief to be out of the police station, no longer second-guessing herself. At one point she felt an overwhelming urge to blurt out Maybe I did kill him I don’t know I can’t remember, and had to fight it down. But she had terrible visions of being presented with incontrovertible evidence of her guilt—a matching gun covered in her prints, microscopic splatters of his blood on her clothes—and having to just accept it.
Lydia automatically closes the door behind herself when she enters her room, then remembers there’s no one to shut out: she’s the only person who lives here now. But then again, it offers an extra line of defense. She goes back to the door and locks it.
She lies on the bed and, even though she’s so exhausted it hurts (it’s wild how sitting in a small room for most of a day and talking to people can be so tiring), she has to ping Mum before it gets too late. It’s almost 3:00 A.M. back home and Lydia’s activity array indicates Mum is deep in a match of Mighty Fleets, the popular game of oceangoing conflict, but she doesn’t seem to be streaming right now, so Lydia pings her to ask if she can put the game on pause and talk.
The conversation with Mum is necessary but in no way useful. “Are you OK?” says Mum, then barely listens to Lydia’s reply, instead launching into a sort of ramshackle ted entitled Why I Have Always Believed New York Isn’t Safe. There are murders happening on every street corner, she says, and everyone has these smartshooters that give you elite sniper skills, and she backs this up with mediocre-truthiness vidclips from a folder she seems to keep for exactly this purpose. Above all she keeps telling Lydia to come home, no matter how many times Lydia explains she can’t, she literally can’t, the police have explicitly banned her from doing so.
“You can’t blame me for worrying,” Mum says.
“Mum, if whoever killed Fitz wanted to kill me they’d have popped upstairs afterwards and got me too while I was asleep.”
“What if they didn’t get a chance? What if they come back for you?”
“Why would they do that? I’m not important.”
“Maybe you know too much.”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t deal with government secrets, we just go to operas and stuff.”
“Why couldn’t they have sent you somewhere nice and safe and nearer?”
“Halifax isn’t that safe, Mum.”
And so on and so on. Mum doesn’t want to let her go off the line but there’s nothing else to say. At least she doesn’t ask Lydia if she killed Fitz. That might just be because it would be a very foolish thing to say over a ping channel—but it genuinely doesn’t seem to occur to her.
“Look,” Lydia says wearily, “the police are guarding the residence round the clock. Nothing’s going to happen to me, I’m safer than ever.”
Mum makes an unconvinced noise.
“I have to go,” says Lydia.
“Why? What’s happening?”
“Nothing, I’m just tired and I need to eat something before I go to bed—why, what did you think was happening?”
“The way you said it sounded like someone had come to take you away.”
Once again Lydia can’t sleep because her mind is snagged on what might have been. What if she’d woken up last night and heard the killer breaking in? Could she have stopped it, or at least identified the killer? Or would she have been killed too? What if she’d gone along with Fitz’s suggestion of leaving the banquet early? Would the killer have had their opportunity? At least Lydia might have been more alert and remembered what happened.
What if she’d never come back from Halifax at all? That’s the kicker. Because she so nearly didn’t. And who knows, Fitz might still have died, but at least she’d be lying on Mum’s sofa right now reading about it and it would have nothing to do with her.
A little after 1:00 A.M. a voice that sounds like Fitz says, You didn’t kill me. Her inner monologue always sounds most like him when she’s trying to be very rational about things.
I know, she replies, drifting into that state where those chemicals that make you dream are seeping into your brain but you’re not quite asleep yet.
The voice keeps insisting: You didn’t kill me. You didn’t kill me. It sounds so like Fitz. She’s going to dream about hearing his voice. She’ll probably dream about it for years. His voice has filled up all the corners of her brain she doesn’t use.
As her brain trips away into unconsciousness, the last thing she does is tell the voice to be quiet.
You didn’t kill me, Lydia.